Ping Fu at the 10,000 Year Clock Site waiting for a laser scan to complete.

We are pleased to welcome Ping Fu to the board of The Long Now Foundation. It was just last year that Ping joined Long Now as a member, and we discussed the possibilities of laser scanning some of the work we were doing at the Long Now Clock site. She is the founder of Geomagic Inc. a company that makes software to visualize and analyse laser scan data. Just a few weeks later we found ourselves standing at the top of a mountain in West Texas looking down the 500 foot deep raise bore.

She had arranged a laser scanning crew to lower their very expensive equipment all the way down the hole. (You can see some of that scanning work at the end of this video about the raise bore drilling.)

Since that time she has attended several of our seminar events, and helped to connect us to her amazing network on a variety of fronts. In general she was already acting as a board member, so we had to extend an invitation to join us.

Below is a bit more about her amazing story and career. Welcome Ping.

Honored in 02005 by Inc. Magazine as “The Entrepreneur of the Year”, Ping Fu describes herself as an artist and a scientist whose chosen expression is business. In 01997, Ping co-founded Geomagic, a software company which pioneers 3D technologies that fundamentally change the way products are designed and manufactured around the world. Used for repairing vintage cars at Jay Leno’s garage to digitally recreating the Statue of Liberty, Geomagic aims to enable design and production of one-of-the-kind products and services at a cost less than mass production.

Before co-founding Geomagic, Ping Fu was program manager of Visualization at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where she initiated and managed the NCSA Mosaic software project that led to Netscape and Internet Explorer. She has more than 30 years of software industry experience in database, networking, geometry processing, and computer graphics.

Ping has received numerous awards for her leadership as an entrepreneur, including Entrepreneur of the Year by Inc. magazine, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the Carolinas, Woman’s Compass award and Life Time Achievements award by Business Leader magazine. She was invited as a guest of the First Lady Michelle Obama at her box for the President’s first State of Union Address in Jan. 02010. You can listen to Ping in her 02011 interview at WUNC, and 02006 interviews for National Public Radio.

Coming straight to the US from a Chinese prison, Ping’s journey (MP3) to entrepreneurship is a remarkable American dream by itself. Her childhood dream was to be an astronaut. Today her company’s software is used to ensure safe return of every NASA space shuttle. “There is a deep current of humanity in the way we approach innovation and business” she says. Ping has one daughter and lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Y.Chen

Nowadays, “resumegate” seems to be quite a common
phenomenon. The recent disclosure of the resumes of Ms. Ping Fu, Chief Strategy Officer of 3D Systems and former CEO of Geomagic, has confirmed beyond doubt that Ms. Fu had provided false information in her job and National Science Foundation grant application. In the two resumes obtained via FOIA requests,
she listed her non-existent BA degree in Chinese Literature from Suzhou University, fabricated her work experiences at the University of New Mexico, University of San Diego, University of California, San Diego, and Nanjing Aeronautical Institute; inflated or fabricated her job titles; and misrepresented her publications and presentation to the extent that she even listed her illegal translation of American author Mary Parsley’s children’s book as her own publication. There is mounting evidence that Ms. Fu’s academic fraud has been ongoing over the past decades to this day, such as misleading her
interviewers and news reporters into believing that she has a Ph. D degree in Chinese Literature from Nanjing University, or a Ph. D degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, that she is a professor of the University of North Carolina, or an adjunct professor at Duke University; depending on which media professionals she talked to or which country she happened to be in when giving such talks. As a result, her non-existent degrees are listed on various websites including Bloomber BusinessWeek (her executive profile listing three non-existent academic degreeshas just been updated after repeated public calls on her to eliminate her
non-existent degrees.) However, when these serious ethical issues are raised, 3D Systems chooses to ignore them instead of launching any investigation.

In 2007, Marilee Jones, a former dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, resigned after “MIT learned she had fabricated her academic degrees from Union College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute when she first applied for an
entry-level admissions officer position with MIT in 1979 and she had fabricated “a degree” from Albany Medical College ‘after she was hired.’”

In 2012, Scott Thompson, former Yahoo CEO, was ousted after he was found to have embellished his college degree.

In February of this year, the German minister of education and research, Annette Schavan, resigned after the University of Düsseldorf
revoked her doctoral degree based on an investigation prompted by an anonymous blogger’s allegation about her plagiarism in her 1980 thesis.

Interestingly, these three people, like Ms. Fu, were all born in the 1950s, are all public figures, and have all been highly successful in their respective career. Yet, they all resigned from their posts following their scandals of academic fraud.

Why is Ms. Fu an exception? Were her academic frauds less serious? Marilee Jones fabricated one of her degrees after she was already hired. So one might argue that the fake degree might have had no effect on her employment. But Ms. Fu fabricated her degree, job title, and publication when she applied for the NSF grant and might have not been awarded hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars if her resume was stripped of the fake elements. In terms of positions, Scott
Thompson was a CEO, while Ms. Fu was a CSO, a position of much less power. Compared with Ms. Fu, Annette Schavan was a much more prominent public figure and much more successful in her career, yet her single act of academic fraud committed in even earlier years still brought her disgrace and cost her job.

With the scope, magnitude, and duration of Ms. Fu’s academic fraud, it would be hard to imagine it was due to an “inadvertent error” or someone else’s attaching other people’s degrees to her name (as Ms. Fu so suggests). So my question is why Ms. Fu seems to be given a free ride. Shouldn’t the same standards be applied to both rank-and-file employees and a White House advisor to President
Obama?